


What We Do in the Snow

by ReyloTrashCompactor (NextToSomething)



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Dreams, Dreamsharing, F/M, Prompt Fill, Shared Dreams, Starkiller Base, dream fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-28
Updated: 2016-12-28
Packaged: 2018-09-12 22:20:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9092992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NextToSomething/pseuds/ReyloTrashCompactor
Summary: The first time she dreamed of Starkiller, not much was different.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dietplainlite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dietplainlite/gifts).



> Written as an entry for a little contest **dietplainlite** was holding. Prompt was "What we do in the snow."
> 
> I had fun writing this little thing. I hope you have fun reading it.

The first time she dreamed of Starkiller, not much was different. The monster Kylo Ren still knocked her sloppy attempts at slashing at him down and away, again and again. The power of his strokes vibrated down her arm until her hands were numb from the impact. She thought she was just reliving that awful moment, after he'd backed her up to a ravine and then, instead of throwing her down it, he offered her a hand up as her teacher. He only had to name the thing pulsing around her--that was lesson enough--and suddenly she'd had him scrambling backwards for a change.

It was when the pulsing thing, the Force, had gotten too dense, too black to even see properly through--and she'd lashed out with an energy she didn't like--that she knew it was a dream. 

Her blow didn't land. Her vision cleared a moment before she made contact and she wrenched the saber away, only singeing his cowl and leaving his face untouched. It was on his own two feet that he watched her retreat this time and saw the chasm open between them. It was only the dying world that was sliced in two this time, not his anguished face, and Rey didn't know what to make of it when she woke.

\--

The next time, she cleaved his head from his shoulders in an even swipe.

\--

She didn't have a weapon, the time after that. He'd managed to summon the blue saber before her and stalked slowly towards her with both weapons lit. He didn't strike at her, however. He turned and slashed and twirled, but only to show her that he could, felling trees and slashing steaming arcs through drifts of snow. It was beautiful, how he moved, and she forgot for a moment to be frightened. When the world opened up behind her, she had the absurd thought that maybe the fall was the only dangerous thing, not the man in black holding two flaming swords.

She almost said yes when he declared her want of a teacher. This time, she had seen something she wanted to learn. 

But she took a step backwards instead.

\--

Once, neither have a weapon. They just stand still, regarding each other in the quickly falling snow. Han's plummet from the catwalk was still fresh in Rey's mind, and all she could think was how quiet death can be. He didn't scream as he fell away from that red blade. Just touched the cheek of the man who killed him and that was that.

It's oddly quiet in the snow, though Rey knows in her mind that the planet was cracking at the seams and she only had moments before it crumbled entirely beneath her feet. 

"You need a teacher," he said in a voice too calm for a world dying, and this time she answered: "I know."

\---

It was exactly as it should be the next time, him with his saber and she with hers, clumsily slashing and swinging and taunting. When she slashed his face he almost looked relieved, like he half expected something else to happen.

Like these weren't her dreams alone and he too knew that they had both done things differently when they had the chance.

\--

As if proving a point, the next night he kissed her. 

She squawked and pushed him down the ravine, because why would that be the first thing he tried once he realized they shared these dreams of different choices in the snow?

\--

He kept to the script when they next met in the snow. Rey realized this was likely because she pushed him off a cliff the last time he tried anything beyond killing her or coaxing her to join him. 

But when it came time for him to speak, his words were just different enough to make her pause.

“You’re good at this. You’re a natural.” And then: “I could teach you to be better.”

She snorted and showed him how much she didn’t need him, marking it permanently across his face. He appealed to her vanity, but then he appealed to his own. 

He was like his father in that way.

\--

She held his saber this time, and he was backing away, blue saber held in unsteady hands. She didn’t like this, she didn’t like how wild his weapon felt in her hands--like gravity didn’t have the same hold on it as everything else. It hurt and burned her hands and moved far too quickly, far too easily. He fell to his knees at the lip of the chasm, but she said nothing at all.

\--

It was when he extinguished his weapon that she really took notice. Turned it off and tucked it into his belt and walked up to her like she hadn’t flayed him alive in at least three other dreams. 

He walked right up to her and she thought he meant to kiss her again. She thought she might not throw him off a cliff this time. 

He didn’t. 

He only laid his hand on hers wrapped around a still lit saber and lowered it gently until it hissed softly in the snow. She looked up into his face and traced a frozen finger over the place where his smoldering wound would soon be, if she followed her previous steps. 

She didn’t.

\---

Her saber didn’t slash up and over his face again, but it was an entire month of dreaming before she left the weapon unlit entirely. 

\---

It was two months before he kissed her again.

\---

It was two months and a day until she kissed him back.

\---

What they do in the snow changed. It started as variations on a theme, then reflections on what they might have done differently. Now, they just meet and talk, a strange truce drawn in the freshly fallen snow. She tells him that she hates him for what he did to Han, and he tells her that wants nothing less. 

He regretted it the moment it happened, but that is not a part of these dreams. That is a truth that is unchangeable, and a truth he must live with.

It’s perhaps this in mind that drove him to light his saber for the first time in weeks. He lifted the thing and Rey’s fear took a moment to catch up after so many months of peace. But he instead lifted it to his own face, using one of the smaller cross-blades to trace a slicing, burning path down the slope of his cheek and brow, just as she had done countless times before.

She gasped at the sight and moved to stop him, but he gently pushed her off, panting and sweating now that his face was raw and open before her. 

“Some things can change and some things can’t. I will always have killed my own father, and you will always have marked your momentary lapse to the Dark across my face.”

She expected him to say something more, but when he didn’t, she pressed cold snow into the burn.

“I’m ready to wake up if you are,” she said, hoping he knew that she wasn’t talking about just now. They had been sleeping and dreaming and only changing when and where it mattered very little. She was ready, she thought, to leave the snow and the what-ifs behind and take her lessons into the waking world.

He considered her for a long moment before finally nodding beneath her hand, still pressing melting snow into his hurt.

“I am,” he said. “It’s too cold here, anyway.”

**Author's Note:**

> Please take a moment and let me know what you think!


End file.
